Finding a study that seems to redefine reality is a rarity, and a provocative article by physics professor Vitaly Vanchurin of the University of Minnesota Duluth (USA), available in prepress, revaluates exactly our reality in an extremely peculiar way by indicating that we and everything in the universe “at ...
Finding a study that seems to redefine reality is a rarity, and a provocative article by physics professor Vitaly Vanchurin of the University of Minnesota Duluth (USA), available in prepress, revaluates exactly our reality in an extremely peculiar way by indicating that we and everything in the universe “at its most fundamental level [is] a neural network.” For decades, researchers have been trying to reconcile general relativity with quantum mechanics without much success. In Einstein's relativity time is relative, but absolute in quantum mechanics. Vanchurin proposes that artificial neural networks exhibit behaviors similar to both theories of physics. He explains that quantum mechanics “is a remarkably successful paradigm for modeling physical phenomena on a wide range of scales” and that “it is widely believed that at the most fundamental level the entire universe is governed by the rules of quantum mechanics and even gravity should somehow emerge from it,” the researcher states.“We're not just saying that artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we're saying that's how the world around us actually works,” it states in the study. “In this regard, it can be considered a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong."In an interview for Futurism Vanchurin explained a little more about his peculiar idea. According to the physicist when a neural network has a very large number of neurons its behavior can be described very well by equations of classical quantum mechanics, which explains how the physical world works. In the article the physicist explores the possibility that the fundamental structure of everything that exists is a microscopic neural network from which everything emerges; both quantum mechanics (which explains the behavior of very small things), and general relativity (which explains how very large things behave). In a previous article on machine learning, the researcher tried to use statistical methods to understand how neural networks behave, but eventually discovered that, in certain aspects, they are many similar to the dynamics of quantum mechanics which led him to explore the idea that the physical world may be a neural network. According to the recent article The Theory can be proved incorrect and "all that is necessary [would be] to find a physical phenomenon that [cannot] be described by neural networks"” When asking the obligatory question, whether the theory of the universe as a neural network means that we live in a simulation the physicist replied that " no, we live in a neural network, but we may never know the difference."
